Writing Blog Number 2

20240720 Organising Myself

Organising Myself

I spent yesterday putting my three - yes, three - submission management systems together. These are just the way I have been doing things since the divorce, and because of disorganisation on my part (and being homeless does not help), I had a Word document, a spreadsheet, and a hand-written thing. So, having spent the better part of 9 hours working on it, I have the following stats:

         Accepted without being published yet: 13
         Published since June 2018: 91
         Rejected in that time: 360
         No Response: 47
         Other results (withdrawn, defunct, etc.): 21 (this includes 2 that were accepted, then the company went belly-up)
         Currently waiting for a response: 22

(Why 2018? That's when the divorce was finalised and I got the computer I now use.)

So, that is 554 submissions (273 individual pieces; the most one piece has been submitted is 16 times) since June 2018. I also discovered I submitted the same piece to the same company a year or two apart twice. (D'oh!)

That means I have averaged 92 submissions each year, with 106 works accepted (even if not all will be published), for a 19% success rate. Not that great, to be honest. But it also means that, of my 143 published works, only 52 were published between 2000 (when I had my first verifiable publication) and 2018, so I have done better than I did back then.

This does not count all the columns written for various websites (and which also pay), as I see that as my journalism and not my true creative work.

I like to think I am getting better at this writing thing. Maybe one day I'll be a real writerer!